CS professor Hanghang Tong named ACM Fellow

CS professor Hanghang Tong from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science has been named an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)  Fellow.  He was recognized for his contributions to theories, algorithms, and applications of large-scale graph mining.

“It was a pleasant surprise,” Tong says. “I was really thrilled to receive this great honor. Being elevated to an ACM fellow is an important milestone in my career. To be honest, I still feel a bit surreal. I am truly grateful to many people: my nominator and endorsers – they have provided strong support, guidance, and, in many cases, encouragement to me over many years. My Ph.D. advisor taught me how to conduct impactful research by asking the right questions in the first place, while having fun. I view this honor by and large as a recognition of my many collaborators and students and the work we have done together.”

His interest in theories, algorithms, and graph mining “happened at the very beginning of my Ph.D. study,” Tong recalls.  “I was attracted to a series of intriguing works on graphs and networks at that time, e.g., graph laws and generators by my Ph.D advisor Christos Faloutsos at Carnegie Mellon University, frequent subgraph mining algorithm gSpan by our own Jiawei Han and Google’s PageRank, etc. I have been ‘stuck’ with graphs and networks (you can probably even say that I have ‘fallen in love’) since then.”

“Graphs and networks not only appear in a wide range of settings and account for a large portion of real word data sets (e.g., graph as ubiquitous data), but also provide a powerful means or context to connect different datasets, data modalities, or data mining tasks and algorithms (a phenomenon that I call network-as-context). These graphs and networks have posed many fascinating theoretical and algorithmic questions

My general research theme is to help users better understand and use large real-world graph and network data. I am interested in high-impact applications such as social networks, e-commerce, infrastructure networks, agriculture, finance, and security where graph mining often plays an important role.”

In 2024, Tong and Jingrui He from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign received an NSF-AI Safety grant to investigate safe graph neural networks.

Tong says the NetSafe project “has been making good progress.”

“One major problem we address is called domain adaptation against distribution shift, that is, to ensure the graph neural networks generalize well to the test environment that is different from the environment in which it was trained. We have developed new algorithms to mitigate graph structure shift (an aspect largely ignored by prior research). We have also developed a new technique, gradual graph domain adaptation, to handle large shifts between the training and test distributions. More recently, we have begun applying similar ideas developed in this project to address broader safety issues beyond graph data (e.g., zero-shot jailbreak detection in language models, moral alignment in vision-language models). We are also happy to host multiple undergraduate students on this project.”

The ACM Fellows program was established in 1993 and recognizes the exceptional contributions of leading members of the computing field. To be selected as an ACM Fellow, a candidate's accomplishments are expected to place him or her among the top 1% of ACM members.

The induction of the ACM Fellows will be held at the ACM Awards Banquet, currently scheduled for June 13, 2026, in San Francisco, California.

Grainger Engineering Affiliations

Hanghang Tong is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science and is affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. Hanghang Tong is a University Scholar. 

Jiawei Han is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science and is affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. Jiawei Han holds the Michael Aiken Chair.